


Gaps

by talefeathers



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 15:27:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14452197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talefeathers/pseuds/talefeathers
Summary: Magnus brushes up against some gaps in his memory. Julia does her best to help.





	Gaps

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Magnus and Julia for "Things you said that made me feel real."

Julia tended to sleep heavily through weeknights, so when she woke up to crickets and pitch-darkness in the time between a Wednesday and a Thursday, an uneasiness crept beneath her bleary-eyed, half-conscious confusion. She turned onto her side to check on Magnus, and was only half-surprised to find that he wasn’t there. After a brief, dull twinge of panic pricked her heart she heard him: the soft rasp of a carving knife beneath the floorboards, in the workshop below their apartment.

She exhaled and turned back onto her back, dragging her hands along her face – down over her eyelids and then to each side across her cheeks. She lay like that for a moment, face stretched comically between her hands, while she gathered the willpower it would take to get up. Then, finally, she pushed herself into a sitting position and nudged her feet into her slippers.

 

“You okay, sweetheart?” she yawned, candle in hand, as she made her way down into the workshop.

Her husband was seated on his favorite stool, lovingly peeling whisper-thin curls of wood from a half-formed shape in his hands. When he looked up at her, his eyes were filled with such a confused, childlike anguish that Julia felt a pang of maternal alarm.

Lined up on the table beside him were a row of perfect wooden ducks.

“Where did I learn how to do this?” Magnus asked.

Julia crossed the room and set her candle down beside Magnus’s, which had burned about a third of the way down. She took his face into her hands and placed a brief kiss on the top of his head.

“You learned that from my dad,” she said. “When you apprenticed under him. ‘Member?”

“ _No,_ ” Magnus said, meeting her eyes again with that same horrible, beseeching look. “He taught me chairs and desks and – and doors and cabins, even, but he never taught me ducks. There’d be no point in teaching me ducks. But I can make ‘em, and – and I can make ‘em _well,_ and. Julia, where did I learn that? When did I practice?”

Julia realized, with deepening discomfort, that Magnus was right; her father didn’t make ducks. Even when he did whittle and tinker, her father made jewelry – bangles and rings and the like. But, for almost as long as she’d known him, Magnus had made ducks. And, for as long as he’d been doing that, he had never made a crude one.

“I don’t remember the name of my hometown,” Magnus spoke again suddenly, voice quivering. “That’s weird, right? I – I remember what it looked like, most of it, but I don’t remember what it was called. Why don’t I remember that? Shouldn’t I remember that?”

“Look at me,” Julia said, gently lifting his chin up until his eyes, wild and sad, met hers. “I – I don’t have answers for you,” she said, hating how frightened she sounded. She swallowed and firmed up her resolve before continuing. “I don’t, I. I don’t know. And I won’t say it’s not important, because I don’t think you’d be this upset if it weren’t. But I will say that even without those pieces… you’re a whole person, Magnus.” She leaned down to give him a single, soft kiss. “You’re whole, and you are where you belong. Regardless of how you came to be here. Alright?”

Magnus said nothing, only exhaled shakily. After a moment’s looking at her, he reached up and took Julia’s head in his own hands, pulling it down until their foreheads met. 

“Talk to me,” Julia said, pushing her fingers slowly through his rusty-brown hair. “Are you okay? Did I help at all?”

“Yeah,” Magnus said, and Julia was relieved to find that his voice was no longer fearful and thin. It wasn’t quite his normal voice yet, but it had acquired a sleepy weight with which she was much more familiar. “I feel like – you know. A person. Again.”

He pulled her into a kiss like the one she had given him: soft and slow.

“I love you, Jules,” he said.

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and gave him a gentle squeeze.

“I love you, too, Mags,” she said. “So, so much.” 

She straightened, then, giving his hair one last tender tousle. 

“You should come back up to bed, baby,” she said, lightening her face with a teasing smile. “We’ve got work in the morning, you know.”

“Ugh,” Magnus said, but Julia heard a reciprocal grin in his voice that calmed her heart considerably. When she finally released him to pick up her candle and tiptoe back up to the apartment, he rose from his stool and picked up his own, following closely behind.


End file.
